Video: Understanding split toning

Before we began to work with Split Toning, let's deconstruct a little bit about how this panel works, and in order to do so, well, we'll be working with this demo file. It's titled grayscale.psd. I'm going to ahead and open this up in the Develop module by pressing the D key. Next, I want to open up my Split Toning panel. So I'm going to press, on a Mac, Command+ 4; on a PC, that's Ctrl+4, or you can simply click on the name Split Toning. One of the things you'll notice here is that this is divided up into Highlights and Shadows.

Understanding split toning

Before we began to work with Split Toning, let's deconstruct a little bitabout how this panel works, and in order to do so, well, we'll be working with this demo file.It's titled grayscale.psd.I'm going to ahead and open this up in the Develop module by pressing the D key.Next, I want to open up my Split Toning panel.So I'm going to press, on a Mac, Command+ 4; on a PC, that's Ctrl+4, or you cansimply click on the name Split Toning.One of the things you'll notice here is that this is divided up intoHighlights and Shadows.

We have a couple of different options.We can open and close this, so we have more or less options.What we can do is define a hue.So go ahead and select a color, and then increase the saturation.What you'll notice is that this color is primarily affecting the highlights.Although, of course, it's always going to affect the shadows a little bit, as well.One of the things that's kind of tricky in regards this is selecting the right color.One way to get a good color is to click on the color picker here and then selecta new color from this menu.

As I select this, you'll notice I've a saturation amount.This is a high saturation, or I can choose a lower saturation amount.Once I've selected the color, all I need to do is to click Close.Now in this case, I have a muted green.Let's say that what I want to do is choose a blue.Well, as I hover over the blues, it's hard to determine which blue is best,because I can't really see it very well.Well, here is a great shortcut that you can use in order to see the color alittle bit more clearly.

On a Mac, you hold down the Option key; on a PC, you hold down the Alt key.Then what you do is you click and drag your hue.Here you can see that when you hold the shortcut key, it's going to show you thecolor at 100% saturation.Then when you let go of that shortcut key, it's going to take it down towhatever saturation it is currently.Let me illustrate this a little bit more.Here is just a small, 18% saturation.Hold down the Option key and click on this icon, and again, you can see a real high amount.

Let go of that.It goes back to the 18 amount.All right, well let's increase this a little bit and take a look at Shadows.Well, with Shadows what we can do is choose saturation.Then we can go through and find a color that looks interesting here.Again, this is primarily targeting my shadows, and it's pushing for myshadows over to the right.Now if I've more saturation, we can see that this is strong, and then there is atransition point up here in the highlights.Increase the saturation on this side, and we're starting to see how these two tones work.

The highlights targets the brighter tones on this grayscale, and the Shadowstargets the darker tones on the grayscale.All right, one more thing to show here is if we click on the Color swatch here,what we can do is we can define Presets.So let's say we like these two colors.What I can then do is hold down the Option key on a Mac, Alt key on a PC, andthen click at one of these swatches, in order to save that as a sample color.I can do this with different colors, as well,again, Option+Clicking in order to set those up as the swatches that I can then select from.

The nice thing about this is that I can then go into my shadows or highlights.I can simply click on one of these in order to use that color, and have that aspart of my Split Tone mix.All right, well now that we know a little bit about how the Split Tone panelworks, let's apply this knowledge, and let's do that in the next movie.

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